Jamie Susskind talks to Katya Adler

Future Politics

Hay Festival 2019,
Saturday 1 June 2019

Susskindconfronts one of the most important questions of our time: how will digital technology transform politics and society? The great political debate of the last century was about how much of our collective life should be determined by the state and what should be left to the market and civil society. In the future, the question will be how far our lives should be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems - and on what terms? Those who control these technologies - usually big tech firms and the state - will increasingly control us. Their algorithms will resolve vital questions of social justice, allocating social goods and sorting us into hierarchies of status and esteem. They will decide the future of democracy, causing it to flourish or decay.